Rose Tremain's The Housekeeper reimagines Rebecca's origins

Rose Tremain's 17th novel, The Housekeeper, explores the imagined origins of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca through a passionate affair between its protagonist and the author herself. The novel, which originated as a 2014 short story, has been adapted into a screenplay by Tremain for an upcoming film starring Anthony Hopkins and Helena Bonham Carter.

The story abounds with references to Rebecca and du Maurier. Its protagonist is Lilianne Danowski, known as Danni, a Polish Jew who fled pogroms as a child. She presides with reserved efficiency over the staff at Manderville Hall in Cornwall. When du Maurier comes to lunch, Danni is deputised to show her around, encouraging her to look through a dead mistress's bedroom and visit the boat house. This begins a year-long affair. Du Maurier was violently attracted to women and had a deeply closeted attitude towards her sexuality. When she cuts Danni off, the housekeeper scrambles to excuse her and cling to their shared past. The devastation is complete when Danni later discovers du Maurier has immortalised her as the bitter and conniving Mrs Danvers, described as 'ugly and diseased with jealousy.' The novel opens with Danni declaring, "Last night I dreamed I saw Daphne again."

Tremain returned to the story after a decade because it was becoming a film. The Housekeeper pays direct homage to Rebecca by imagining the events that might have inspired it. In the book's opening pages, du Maurier demands teasingly: "What am I to do with you, Danni? How am I to make you come alive?"

Context and influences

Rebecca is part of a complex interplay of gothic novels, from Jane Eyre to Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea. Du Maurier famously called her own book 'a study in jealousy.' She succeeded in creating a woman of toweringly vengeful, transgressive authority who dominates even in death. Tremain's novel engages with this legacy and du Maurier's complex sexuality while reworking the dynamics of power and jealousy. However, the greater scope of the novel gives it none of Rebecca's subversive complexity. Without a lurching sense of malignity and darkness, Daphne's betrayal of Danni feels like petty spite.

Character and critique

Tremain's portrayal strips Danni of the fierce dignity seen in her earlier version. Peripheral characters from the original story swell into caricature. Lord de Whithers becomes the bumbling Lord Grenville-Whithers, and his self-absorbed niece becomes a screaming harpy. Danni's dead father is recalled in aphorisms more akin to fortune cookies than philosophy. The exquisite tension between Daphne and Danni fails to hold. Although this version of Danni tells all, the affair scenes remain curiously bloodless. They feature hands and lips and tongues but no fire, no heart. By stripping Danni of her fierce, quiet dignity, Tremain has robbed her of power.

In contrast, the 2014 story offered a masterclass in 1930s restraint. There, Tremain portrayed Danni as undone by du Maurier, with her careful armour torn away yet bound by discretion, much like Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. Danni was a supplicant and vessel who knew she had no power. The malignity and darkness that gave Rebecca its vertiginous tension is missing in the novel's expansion. The Housekeeper by Rose Tremain is published by Chatto & Windus.